When the Bristol Channel Flooded in 1607, London's Presses Called It God's Warning
Wonderful Weather: Floods and Foreboding in 17th-Century Britain
In 1607 a storm surge drowned some 2,000 people around the Bristol Channel, and London's booming presses rushed out pamphlets framing the disaster as divine punishment for a sinful nation. Erik Crnkovich traces how cheap print fed a seventeenth-century appetite for prodigies, omens, and miraculous weather, and how authors fought to prove their reports credible.
Many are the dumb warnings of Destruction, which the Almighty God hath lately scourged this our Kingdom with; And many more are the threatening Tokens, of his heavy wrath extended toward us.